For more than ten thousand years we have been building things. Some of the oldest known written word deals with the construction of buildings. What can the things that we as individual designers want to build tell us about our own ambitions and desires to enter into this ten-thousand-year-old discussion?

The studio course centers around three primary activities: reading, discussing, and making full-scale architectural details. We have read a series of essays, chapters, and selections from pieces of text loosely associated with phenomenology. In the discussions we have attempted to relate ideas from the readings to our own critical practice as designers and active agents in the production of physical culture. We have used reading and design work to explore our own means of approaching the meta-project that is sometimes called civilization, urbanity, culture, or humanity. Ultimately, our aim is to begin to know where we stand in relation to this larger project.

Each student has proposed an architectural detail that is part of a wall and has built it at full scale. Typical programs include a means of passage, a means of viewing out, a means of viewing in, a means of sitting or resting, a means of working, a means of rising up – i.e. a door, a window, a seat, a desk, a stair. The architectural detail should be justified with careful excerpts from specific texts.
Final proposals include both architectural drawings and a written discussion of how the ideas expressed through architectural detail are related to those texts.

Exhibition on view: Thur, Aug 6th – Fri, Sept. 18
For more information about Eric Peterson, please visit here.